


the continuing cure

by unconscious



Series: endgame [4]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), off-duty superheroes processing their grief together using their words
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-04
Updated: 2019-07-02
Packaged: 2020-04-07 19:02:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19091164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unconscious/pseuds/unconscious
Summary: Deleted scenes, alternative POVs, etc fromThe Way Back verse.Chapters are connected but can be read as standalones.





	1. a heart that's full up like a landfill

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> quick short scene from the new new Avengers facility.

_Cure does not exist without maintaining a relationship to the experience._

* * *

The nicest thing about the new new Avengers facility in Paterson, New Jersey - other than the fact it's hidden underground instead of an enormous visible bullseye - is the changing rooms. They're not labeled with names, but certain rooms have been claimed by certain people, and this one, with its immense shower, heated floor, vanity, and an entire damn couch is Sam's.

He glances at his drill suit where it hangs on the garment rack with his weighted vest to simulate the wingsuit. Today he just wore sweats, lifting weights in the normal gym, so the navy and white drill suit with its faint star on the chest was untouched. No fighting, no tactical strategizing. No mental work. Just him and the squat rack and the weights, like it was before all this hero stuff. The simplicity is a breather. He pulls on a clean pair of shorts and sits on the couch with a sigh, his body pleasantly sore from the lifting and loose from the shower.

This whole Captain America thing. Sam's getting used to it.

When he'd first gotten the promotion, (ugh, he hates that he calls it that, but he hasn't been able to shake the term since Bucky said it so flat and sardonic to Darlene) he'd run through a gamut of feelings in the space of a breath: pride, honor, then shock, terror, self-doubt. Then loss. A deep loss aching like a bruise. Big shoes to fill, to say the least. He still has his doubts. Doubt that his body is physically capable of keeping up with his enhanced coworkers. Doubt that he'll be able to lead and inspire with an appearance of steadfast effortlessness. Doubt that he'll make the right tactical decisions on the fly. And additionally the doubt that the public will accept him, a black man, as their Captain America, after the loss of their blond-haired-blue-eyed good ol' boy. Regardless of who Steve actually was, that's the image. Who Steve actually was: a soldier, a strategist, a skeptic, a friend. And those qualities Sam knows he can embody, if he can just let go of the baggage, which he can, a lot of the time.

Strange to think this all began on a morning run, a lifetime ago.

He misses Steve. Misses the way he always listened, intently, with a focus that made Sam feel like he was the only person in the room for that moment. The authoritative clip of his voice in the field, and how it smoothed into a rich baritone Brooklyn accent off the clock. His endless, fidgety doodling. His surprisingly varied taste in music. And his uncompromising determination. Not optimism - the man had a death wish for as long as Sam knew him. But when he had a goal it was like he was stricken with a disease. It consumed him. Or maybe it was just the search for Bucky that consumed him. Steve was not optimistic about Bucky. But regardless of Bucky's condition Steve was determined to find him. It was the finding that was important. And, apparently, Steve could eventually manifest anything into reality, besides self-awareness.

Sam had not expected to draw so close and so quickly to Steve as they tore through Europe. Such was the power of foxhole love.

(In the scrubby brush of the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan, so late at night as to be early morning at the edge of a Marines outpost after an all-night recon mission, Riley and Sam sat inside a spare tent as they awaited their orders to return to Kabul. In the dim light, covered in dirt and sweat and still wearing his wingsuit, Riley had pulled a cigarette from his jacket, lit it, and offered a drag to Sam. Sam had been stunned to see such a precious resource. And so he had gratefully taken a drag and tilted his head back against the sturdy tent pole and sighed in pleasure as nicotine flooded his beaten body. Sam can still see the quirk of Riley's mouth and the spark in his exhausted green eyes as he'd knocked his leg against Sam's and said, "That's foxhole love for ya.")

Close-quarters, drive-in-silence, ignore-the-flashbacks love. A sleep on opposite ends of the floor when there's two beds love. An on your six love. And he should get it, really. He of all people. Steve isn't hard to love.

It's almost darkly funny now that neither Steve nor Sam figured it out even as Steve was slaughtering HYDRA operatives with Bucky's name in his mouth. In retrospect, obviously Steve loved Bucky. It was just the foolishness of war and the cruelty of brainwashing that kept them apart. And - it shames Sam to think this - he's jealous of that sometimes. In his darkest weakest moments he wonders if he is a consolation prize. Regardless of what Bucky says Steve's shadow hangs over their relationship, or whatever it is, looming like great plane oncoming in a nosedive.

And Bucky.

Bucky thrums with a subdued sense of power. Like he's always trying to hold back something astonishing. Even curled miserably into himself at the lakehouse, gutted, frighteningly flat, he'd moved with smoothness, efficiency, power. Then as he'd loosened, come back from his soul's dark night, Sam felt like they met anew. Not the shade he chased in Europe, or the immense man he fought beside in Germany, or the bedraggled waif in Wakanda. And - he's fairly certain of this - not the man Steve knew before the war. But someone new. Someone else.

This Bucky - _his_ Bucky - is good with his hands. He's endlessly fixing things. He scowls when he can't find the words he wants. He smirks and grins and smiles and sneers, plainly and openly expressive. He's antsy, always looking for a way to focus his attention on other people, to help. He's experienced so much pain and loss and misery and yet still moves so sweetly and kindly through the world. Sam sometimes can't believe Bucky's not lost to his past.

There are these moments, in their shared life together. Like when Bucky is in the kitchen flipping a knife as he waits for his oatmeal to microwave, or singing old war songs as he weeds their community garden plot, or delicately instructing a complex grappling move. In these moments Sam thinks - Of course I love you. _Of course._

Were Steve still here it might be different. But he's not. And they are. And Sam loves Bucky. How could he not?

"Hey," Bucky says as he raps his metal knuckles on the door to the changing room. "You decent?"

Sam blinks back into the moment and says, "Pretty much."

Bucky prowls in. He's still wearing his hair short, which makes him look severe, but beautiful, drawing attention to his quick-moving sniper's eyes. He's showered already, wearing sweatpants and the too-small Kingman Elementary sweatshirt Darlene bought him, on purpose, Sam suspects, as it rides up when he moves to show a thin strip of skin and hipbone. 

"Would you?" Bucky asks, but he's not really asking, he's informing, and it makes Sam smile.

"'Course." He takes the camphor liniment Bucky holds out. Bucky strips off his sweatshirt and sinks to the heated floor in front of Sam. Sam twists the lid off the jar and says, "How's Gabi's sparring going?"

"The suit's good for her," Bucky says. "Fits her style. I've been going pretty hard on her and she's able to hold her own."

"But not full strength?"

"Mm, dunno if I want to."

Despite the elegance of Wakandan prosthetics Bucky's arm still bothers him sometimes. The cure for this pain, Sam is pretty sure, is acknowledgement that having the arm is not a gift or a superpower or even a choice.

So Sam dabs the liniment on Bucky's left shoulder on the old scarring where skin meets metal and presses the palm of his hand gently there.

Bucky groans and melts under Sam's hands, his whole body sinking back towards Sam's legs. He used to be so tense and distant. To see him like this, soft and pliant under Sam's hands, sinking back defenseless, makes Sam's heart twist. As Sam works his fingers into Bucky's trapezius muscle Bucky's arm whirs and hums, adjusting its plates minutely like a cat vibrating with a purr. It's charming.

The world today is bleak and lonely. When Bucky is near him his insecurities and doubts feel insignificant - though that doesn't make them any less real. But Bucky's actions are always confirming what Sam's mind knows - that he's not second best. It's not a ranking or a contest or a challenge. What they have is different and new, something they're making together. Bucky chooses him every day. Sam knows it in his mind, he just needs his heart to catch up and stop worrying.

It's fuckin' hard to have a boyfriend who's lived a hundred years and was traumatized by basically all of it.

"I want to ask you something," Bucky says, suddenly, like he's forced himself to spit the sentence out.

"Sure."

"Can you tell me about Riley?"

Not a question Sam was expecting. It surprises him enough that his hands pause for a long moment.

Where to start? Does Sam open with: sometimes you remind me of him, when you make one of those funny dark jokes when the situation is really bad, or when you're idly flipping a knife in the kitchen, or when you wake up mad for no reason? Or does he start with Riley's skill in the air, easily better than Sam, maneuvering so deftly as if he was a bird transformed? Or how about Riley's brother at the funeral, cursing Sam for recruiting Riley onto the pararescue team?

"It's just - you know everything about Steve," Bucky says, and Sam can feel him beginning to tense. "Probably more than I do, if I'm being honest. And I never heard you talk about Riley other than that one time in group. But I know he was - is - important. To you. So. I just. I want to know about him. Share the load I guess you would say. But you don't have to tell me anything."

"Chill out," Sam says, and he wants to comb his hands through Bucky's hair in the way he knows he likes but the liniment is everywhere, so instead he rubs both thumbs in circles at the base of Bucky's skull, tilts his head down and kisses the top of Bucky's head. "I want to tell you. I'm just thinking."

Bucky relaxes as if on command.

Sam organizes his thoughts while working at Bucky's shoulders.

"He died a long time ago," Sam says, eventually. "In 2009. So I don't really feel the need to talk about him as much, since there's all this new bad shit that's happened since then. But I mean, I still miss him. I probably think about him at least every other day. Even if it's just a little something that reminds me of him. Like your knife-flipping. He used to do that, too.

"We basically lived in each other's pockets during the war, in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We were the only two guys with wingsuits, and so we had to do everything. Maintenance, repair, testing, upgrades, whatever. You know how the military is, talk big game until you get there and then they leave you with jack shit. So we were dependent on each other. Man, he was funny. Really funny. This kind of grim, deadpan humor that'd come out in the middle of a serious strategizing meeting and just knock you dead with how unexpected it was. Sharp guy. Green eyes. Loved Fela Kuti and Patsy Cline. Looked white but his Mom was Mexican; he taught me some Spanish so we could talk shit about our CO. If you think I know how to fly you should've seen him in the wingsuit. When he first got the suit it was like he had gotten them back from an absence. Like he was re-learning something he already intuitively knew."

Bucky's head is tilted back so he can look up at Sam, his grey-blue eyes intently focused.

"Loyal til the moment he died, too," Sam says. "When he got shot down, the RPG didn't actually hit him. It went wide and hit the suit. Fried it. Chute wouldn't pull. And so he was - he was totally conscious. Unharmed. And in the darkness he looked at me and he fell to his death. In total silence so they wouldn't fire on me too." He pauses. "I've never told anyone that."

"I'm sorry," Bucky says.

"Yeah, me too. Get up here."

Bucky heaves himself onto the couch and leans heavily on Sam. "You know, if you ever are. Reminded, or anything. You could tell me."

"Hm," Sam says, winding his arm around Bucky's shoulder, tugging him close. "Okay. I will. You've thought about this a lot."

"Well. I have some catching up to do. I have been sort of. Busy. Or self-involved. For a while."

"Dude, you were brainwashed. Cut yourself some slack."

"How long do I get to use brainwashing as an excuse? It's been... almost ten years."

"Five of which we were Vanished! The other five of which included multiple intergalatic battles!"

"So you're saying I can keep using it?"

Sam laughs, and wipes the camphor liniment off his hands on Bucky's sweatpants, earning him a sideways glare. Then he tilts Bucky's head towards him and kisses him slow and easy. Bucky sighs into the kiss, deepening it, his teeth catching on Sam's lips. "You don't need any excuses with me, baby," Sam hums, and something about that makes Bucky shudder and shift, moving to straddle Sam on the couch. Sam's hands immediately find Bucky's hips, gripping tight there, pulling him close, letting Bucky's always surprising heavy weight sink him down into the couch. Bucky has a hand on Sam's face and another at the back of his neck and then they're kissing again, intensely, heated.

"You're too fuckin' good to me," Bucky murmurs against his mouth, eyes closed, like he's not even aware he's saying it in that rich rolling Brooklyn drawl that only comes out occasionally, "I swear I can't hardly stand it."

For one wild moment Sam wishes they were in the throes of another war, simply so he could appreciate these moments for the gifts they are, instead of spinning his wheels incessantly about the ever-changing nature of grief and love. Doubtless war will come again, in their line of work. So he skates his hands up the flat planes of Bucky's muscled back, says, "Well, I can't be rude to a senior citizen," and feels the rumble of Bucky's low pleased chuckle in his chest, and that, for now, is enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Epigraph from Paths to Transformation by Kate Burns. Title from Radiohead - No Surprises


	2. a flame in your heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky wants to go dancing, Sam obliges.

_Love is real. Our love was real_   
_It's a hand, it's a hold, it's a shield_   
_Our love was real. Our love was real_   
_It's to hope, it's to dream, it's to heal_

* * *

"You know, Sam," Bucky says from where he's standing in the kitchen doorway, watching Sam shape his sourdough bread into a boule for baking. It's mid-Sunday morning, and Sam has nothing on his schedule other than baking this bread and eating it with butter. Bucky's holding a cup of coffee, wearing one of Sam's old VA tees and his boxer-briefs, his legs long and muscled and tan, crossed at the ankle where he's leaning against the doorframe. "It's my birthday soon."

"Well, damn, it is," Sam says. It'll be March 10th in a week. It seems like Bucky's been here, living in Sam's New York City apartment, both longer and shorter than the actual two-and-a-half months. "You want to celebrate? How old you turning, a hundred and fifty?"

"A hundred and eight, smartass. And, I dunno, I was thinking about it."

"Hell yeah," Sam says. "Let's have the gang over. Make tacos. Eat cake. Play pin the tail on the Ant-Man." Sam finishes shaping his bread. "Hey, will you grab the pot out of the oven? It's pre-heating."

Bucky rolls his eyes. He sets his coffee down and opens the oven, then grabs the heavy, burning-hot cast iron dutch oven in his vibranium left hand like it weighs nothing. He holds the pot steady as Sam drops the dough in. It sizzles merrily. "Listen to that crust form," Sam says. "I love it."

"You done admiring?"

"Yeah, throw it in the oven for me. So what do you want to do?"

Bucky throws it in the oven. "I wanna go dancing."

Now that's not what Sam was expecting. "Dancing, huh?"

"We're in Harlem, man."

"Washington Heights, technically. Harlem is expensive now." Sam washes the flour off his hands. When he turns back around, Bucky's gripping his coffee mug again like a security blanket.

"I used to go dancing a lot," Bucky says. "Pick up a date, ask her to bring a friend for Steve, take them to the dance halls in Brooklyn. But that was really only at the tail end of the Depression. Right before I got drafted. But before..."

Sam sits down at the kitchen table and motions for Bucky to sit as well.

"I mean. I was eighteen or nineteen, and the Depression was... You know about it, I know you do, but you - you don't, really. I had occasional work as a brick layer. Worked a lot with this guy--" Bucky closes his eyes for a long moment. His sharp memory like a rifle-sight moving across the horizon of his life. "Daniel. He lived in Harlem. A black Jew. He was helping people settle, people who were moving from the South, getting away from Jim Crow. And no one had fuckin' jobs. So people would throw these parties. Rent parties. 'Cause, you know, white landlords were charging people double what the rent shoulda been."

Sam must look confused, because Bucky continues, "If you couldn't make rent that month, you'd throw a party, with booze and food and music and gambling, and everyone who attended would throw in a little money. S'where I learned to dance.

"The stars had to align right, though. Like, if Daniel and I were working uptown on a construction site, and we happened to have a few pennies extra, and I didn't have to get home to tend to sick Steve, and there happened to be something going on, then maybe Daniel would take me out. If I hadn't been carrying a torch for Steve then something might've happened," Bucky says with a little smirk. "That part I remember."

"Sorry, hang on." Sam leans across the table. "You're telling me you were a gay white Jew in the 1930s attending dance parties in segregated Harlem as a black guy's date?"

"I ain't a queer," Bucky says, like it's an automatic reflex.

"Uh, hate to break it to you, buddy, but what you and I got going on ain't exactly straight."

"I mean." Bucky shakes his head slightly as if it shake off the past. "Sorry. People don't say that shit anymore, do they?"

"No, they really don't."

"I couldn't be... Like that. Because I was afraid people would go after Steve more than they already did. He was supposed to be a good Irish Catholic boy, but he was already bunking with a Jew and organizing with the local commies. I didn't want to add more fuel to our fire. And, smartass, I bat for both teams."

"So you snuck off to go drinking in Harlem?"

"Yeah. Moonshine," Bucky says, dreamily. "Booze had just become legal again, recently, so people were still bootlegging, 'cause it was cheaper."

Jesus, Sam thinks. Prohibition. The vastness of Bucky's history continues knock these facts loose like so much dust. "What were these parties like?"

"Big," Bucky says. "Raucous. Usually just one guy with a piano who got paid in booze and food. Pig's feet, tomato rice, hoppin' john... Shit, man. Girls with their skirts hiked up above the knees. Guys with their shirts unbuttoned all the way. I danced a little but I usually stuck to gambling, in these little apartments partitioned off with a sheet so we could shoot dice in privacy. Danny was real tall, wiry. He'd dance all night, get real drunk and sweaty, hmm, walk me back to the train station in the dark. Get real close and make me promise not to tell anyone about it. And I never did." Bucky pauses. "He's dead now, though, ain't he," he says, as if Sam could answer that question.

The timer screams its completion, breaking the tenuous silence between them.

"You need me to take the lid off, baby?" Bucky asks.

"I don't _need_ you to, it's just so hot that it's hot even through the potholder," Sam says, and Bucky just gives him an odd little smile as heaves himself up from where he's sitting. He opens the oven and grabs the dutch oven's lid with his metal hand and sets it atop the stove while Sam resets the timer.

"Hey," Sam says, catching Bucky's wrist before he sits back down. Bucky turns, faces him, and Sam reaches up, pulls him down for a kiss. "I'll take you dancing for your birthday," he says. "We'll get all dressed up. Make it a whole night. What made you think of it?"

Bucky pauses thoughtfully, flicks his eyes around the room as he often does when he's choosing his words. His hand, the wrist still loosely caught in Sam's hand, finds Sam's jawline and traces it. "I can still fight like the Soldier. I can shoot like Sergeant Barnes. So I gotta wonder, can I still dance like Buck?"

There it is, that nickname that Sam is so careful not to use. Never _Buck_ , always _Bucky_. Only Steve called him Buck. Like how only Bucky called him _Stevie_. Their identities so entwined crying out for the other was a calling out to the self: Bucky and Steve becomes Stevie and Buck. 

 

Bucky doesn't want to make a whole thing of it, he says, so Sam only invites Gabi. She arrives at their apartment in tight slacks and a stylishly large blazer, its broad shoulders somehow accentuating the fine jut of her cheekbones. Sam's wearing jeans and a collared shirt, because he isn't sure what else to wear, he doesn't really go out much these days. Crowds make him itchy sometimes. The event he'd found said it was Harlem Renaissance-themed - leave it to New York to have everything you need - but what does one wear to these events? He's not really planning on dancing, anyway.

"Where's the birthday boy?" Gabi asks, uncorking the wine she's brought and pouring a glass for Sam and herself.

"Primping," Sam says, rolling his eyes.

"A man's gotta look his best to go out on the town." Bucky steps out of their bedroom as if on cue. He's used product to slick back his neat short hair. He's wearing slacks - Sam doesn't think he's ever seen Bucky wear slacks, didn't even know he owned a pair - tapered, but not fitted, and a simple white collared shirt. He's adjusting the cuffs as he steps into the kitchen, buttoning them closed and pulling a thin glove over his vibranium hand. Sam's mind rockets forward to the end of the night where hopefully he'll get to see Bucky with this collared shirt damp with sweat, open at the collar, the glove lost, the sleeves rolled up over his muscular forearms. He wants to see Bucky open-eyed and out of hiding.

"Hey, Gabs," Bucky says, and smiles slow and wide at her. "Thanks for coming."

"Don't you look fancy," she says and gives him a leer, then a hug.

"Now, look," Sam says, "This might be a total bust. I don't know if this event will live up to the wild bootlegger parties of your youth, so if we hate it we'll just dip out and grab a drink somewhere, okay?"

Bucky softens. "You're nervous," he says.

"Well, I - it may not be up to your dancing standards."

Gabi laughs, finishing her wine, adjusing the lapels of her jacket. "Let's go find out, boys."

When Bucky shrugs on his brown leather jacket, a beat up old thing he found in a thrift store, turns and nods towards the door, Sam's breath catches. It's not like the pre-war Bucky he's seen in museums, photos and videos, no, it's something different about him. Like Bucky is uncovering these fragile pieces of his past and slowly, carefully, meticulously integrating his disjointed self into a whole.

 

Okay. It's not a full-on bust. But it's definitely a little corny.

They're in a basement bar in Harlem, a little speakeasy-themed placed called Attagirl, one of those bars that's unmarked and tucked away to give those who know about it a sense of elitism. The ceilings are low and the lights dim and intimate, and the dark wooden furniture has been pushed up against the walls to create more space on the scuffed hardwood floor. On a small stage at the far end of the bar a three-piece band sets up. There's a mix of clientele at the bar: curious older people, young women dressed to the nines in dresses and pearls, young men in tailored three-piece suits with the jackets swung carelessly over their shoulders, people like Sam wearing jeans and nerves.

"I get what you were saying," Bucky says, swirling a glass of wine. "Kinda like a costume party, ain't it?"

"Kinda," Sam says.

"It all depends on them," Gabi says, nodding seriously towards the band as they settle into position.

"It's still weird as fuck that I can't smoke inside," Bucky muses.

The band starts to play, just a piano, an upright bass, and a trumpet. The jazz is uptempo, bouncing, but not too fast - decidedly 1930s. The open space in the bar begins to fill with couples, beginning to dance a little tentatively. Sam starts working on his second drink. He and Bucky are leaning against the corner of the bar, surveying. Bucky's gone loose and catlike, tracking the crowds not like a soldier but like a man looking for a date. It's nice, Sam thinks as he drinks his bourbon, listens to the jazz play easy and slow to warm up the crowd. It's nice to be here doing something civilian. In the strangeness of his new life it's easy to forget sometimes why he does it in the first place - for things like this, people getting together, making music, dancing, just for the sake of doing it at all. The miraculous, rebellious uselessness of art and community.

When a strawberry blond man in a rumpled suit asks Gabi to dance, she accepts.

The music continues. Speeds up. The tempo gets faster, the dancing more frenetic. More drinks flow. More experienced dancers find their way to the floor. In the crowd Gabi's quick hands flash like birds. Feet begin to fly, kicking up, arms swinging, skirts flying, jackets lost, partners laughing as they cut around the floor, twirling around each other, in lovely improvised routines.

The bass continues playing its rhythm into the next song. A wailing, howling trumpet. Then a skittering piano line, the pianist singing rambunciously without amplification, his baritone voice carrying through the room, the words inaudible. 

" _Sing Sing Sing_. The Prima version," Bucky says, his eyebrows raised. "That's something." He whistles his appreciation loud enough to cut the air next to Sam's ears. Sam didn't even know he could do that. "Wish me luck," he says, shrugging off his jacket and abandoning his wine glass.

"Doubt you need it."

Bucky throws him a wink over his shoulder.

* * *

There's a fragile liminality to this evening. Bucky feels as if he is stretched over his full century of living. It's not bad, just delicate - an experiment, really, testing his strength. Like how Sam pulls off a small piece of dough when he's kneading it, stretching it between his fingers to see if it's strong and elastic. If it breaks during the stretch, just needs more kneading.

Sam is standing at the bar, holding his jacket, watching him with his arms crossed over his chest, his chin tilted down slightly. Closed off until he feels comfortable, but always game, always patient, always curious. Sam's instinctive, insatiable curiosity: his easy way of encouraging others to open up, to widen their views. And he doesn't ever seem to realize he's doing it. Sam's way of navigating the world continuously draws Bucky outwards.

The music is familar but not too familiar; the dancing is good but a little too practiced. The differences ground him. But the pleasure of listening to the band, hearing the feet on the floor, moving in sync with others - the draw is still the same. Memories keep dredging up unexpectedly at certain trumpet cries or piano rolls. He remembers sticking his head out from the partition between the dance floor and the dice rolling, watching Danny's ankles and feet move as if on water as he spun a girl close - wishing he could be there, between them, but fixated on the dice, trying to win a few bucks, to be able to buy Steve an apple or something.

He lingers at the edge of the crowd, scanning, then catches someone's eye - a young woman, her hair in tight natural curls, her lipstick a rich purple-red. She's wearing low heels and a pale dress that stands stark against her dark skin.

"Care to dance?" he asks as he approaches, standing close enough to speak but not too close.

She gives him a once-over curiously. "I haven't seen you at one of these dances before."

"I'm new in town."

"Thank you for the offer, but I prefer to dance with more experienced partners."

"Fair enough. You're experienced?"

"I've been dancing in this style casually for a few years, so yes, I'd say so."

"Where'd you learn?"

She steps away slightly. "There are flyers around for the different studios. I think I'll grab a drink."

"Ah." He's out of practice. The rejection, strangely, thrills him. "If you're looking for experience I'd say I got a few years. What are we dancing tonight? Lindy? Balboa? Jitterbug? Charleston?"

The woman pauses, steps back in. "What's your name?"

"James," he says, without even considering a lie. It rolls easy off his tongue.

"I'm Nadia. You can dance improv?"

"Ma'am, gotta tell you, it's the only way I know how."

Dancing comes back as simply as violence. Nadia draws him towards the center of the room as the band rolls into a new song. It's something vaguely familiar from some depth of his memory, the bass fast and thrumming, the trumpet sharp and frenetic, the piano thrashing. The music washes over him, and with her small hand in his he draws her in and he's leading her, she's following, hips moving close in and fast, feet flashing across the floor, the casual intimacy of truckin', then pulling her into a spin, her skirt a pale flash like the moon, bodies low, close then apart, Suzy Q, spinning, the rapid hopping snapping steps of lindy, letting the jazz take him from here to 1935 and back.

They dance until the sweat runs down the back of Bucky's shirt.

As the music slows, he pulls Nadia in close. He keeps his right hand on her waist and their left hands connected, and in her heels she's just shy of his height. Her eyes are dark and pensieve looking up at him, a slight ring of mascara visible around her eyes where she's sweated off her makeup. 

"Where'd you learn to dance like that?"

"Here. In Harlem."

"When?"

He smiles his best roguish smile. "Who can keep track?"

She squeezes his left hand pointedly. They dance until the song ends, and she pulls away. "Lovely to meet you, James." Then Nadia in her pale dress disappears into the crowd, and Bucky stands alone, stock-still and reeling, the dance like the forgotten burn of moonshine, and as the people shift and change partners around him in the next uptempo song Bucky's eyes fall on Sam immediately, drawn like a ship to a lighthouse.

* * *

Most dancers on the floor, in Sam's inexpert opinion, moved to the music with a performative air. They danced like established partners who had practiced the steps in a mirror, like they'd taken a couple classes for fun after work. Bucky and his partner - a slim, muscular girl who'd looked surprised, a little out of her depth, but able to keep up - had moved so unbeautifully it was mesmerizing. They danced with unselfconscious, joyful effort. Dancing for the feeling of embodiment, with an ease that only arrives in a life sufficiently unsupervised, unrecorded, unsurveilled. But Sam's not really surprised. Bucky's physicality, his body awareness, his connection to place and movement: these traits made him a remarkable soldier.

Bucky leaves the dance floor bright-eyed and sweating like a windowpane in winter. His collar's open and a lock of dark hair has escaped his careful coif and falls towards his eyes. He cuts around people and beelines to Sam, pausing only to do a flashy little shuffle-step in front of him, one hand on his belt buckle like a samba move. It makes Sam grin.

"I still got it," Bucky says, and his smile is all teeth.

"Told you," Sam says. "You get her number?"

Bucky steps closer. "'Course not, ace. You know I'm a one-woman man now." Bucky rests his hand on the wall by Sam's head, boxing him in, and leans in to briefly kiss Sam's neck. "I don't like that I can't smoke, but I sure like that I can do this."

"Yeah, I know," Sam says through a laugh. "Easy, there." And Sam does know. Surpising even himself he's not jealous of the intimacy of the dancing, of Bucky's flirtatious, devilish smiles at the girl, of the casual way he held her close by the waist. Apparently Sam's bouts of jealousy are relegated to a certain blond American hero only. If he can cope with that he can cope with a dance.

"What do you think about? When you're dancing."

"Nothin'," Bucky says, immediately, his voice a low rumble in Sam's ear. "That's the best part."

Gabi sidles up, arm-in-arm with the man she'd been dancing with, the man with his blond hair tucked behind his ears, flushed with exertion and gaping openly at Bucky and Sam.

"Foggy and I are continuing the party elsewhere," Gabi says, "If you two would deign to join us." Bucky and Sam break apart, both smiling, leaning back against the wall of the bar.

"That's--" the man says, his eyes tracking over Bucky's face, then his left arm, then Sam's face. "And you're--" Sam crosses his arms over his chest.

"James and Sam," Gabi supplies neatly.

"I seriously can't catch a break," Foggy grouses.

Bucky huffs. "Why does everyone know who I am? I'm growing my hair out again."

 

Foggy and Gabi ramble off into the cold Harlem night in a peal of stumbling laughter. It's late, and the streets are a quiet kind of busy, people a few drinks in going to the next bar or the closest diner or the subway. Sam tugs Bucky close to him and they amble north towards home, stopping at a Caribbean restaurant rowdy with patrons and humming with music. On the curb outside they eat jerk chicken out of styrofoam containers.

"That was fun," Bucky says. "The dancing. I don't think I'll do it again, though."

"No?" Sam didn't think he'd go out and join a lindy hop club or anything, but he thought it might be a here and there sort of thing. A way of living in those pre-war memories however briefly. Lord knows Sam wants something like that, an escape hatch, a way to drop back into the self he was before his service. A way to remember the sweet simplicity of a life untouched by violence. He wonders, sometimes, if his path had diverged, if he had gone to Columbia and studied psych instead of choosing the Air Force, would he be any closer to that elusive sense of peace? A soldier's life is a battered life. But likely that's not unique to soldiering. Even his father was unsuccessful, in his quest for meaning he found God but then died bloody intervening in someone else's fight. His memories of Harlem in his youth are mixed. The two-bedroom apartment stuffed with him and Darlene and their parents, until his father's death and his mother's nervous breakdown. Then just him and Dee. Odd jobs, then better jobs, less-than-legal jobs. Fights, trouble. Not that much different than how he's ended up now. But being back, listening to the hum of the city and the laughter of the patrons in the restaurants, knocking his knees against Bucky's, he wonders why he ever traded it for the rough sands of Afghanistan.

Oh, but he knows why. To be human is to be discontent. Nearly a divine state, the gut-deep craving for change and discovery. Crawling back into the past only serves to remind him that what he wants is the unknown, oncoming like a stormcloud.

"Got my fill, I think," Bucky says. "Unless you want to learn."

 

"Put on music," Bucky says, locking the door of the apartment behind him. "Something you like."

"Bossy," Sam mutters, but he does, flipping through his old iPod on the secondhand stereo until he decides on Al Green, guess he can't really knock a party for being corny when he comes home with his man and puts on Al Green but it's comforting, slow and soft and filtering through their small apartment as he trails Bucky to their bedroom, watching Bucky toss his jacket aside and work at the buttons of his shirt.

In their bedroom Bucky pins him to the wall and kisses him, hard, both hands on Sam's face, the intensity of it surprising Sam as he tries shake off the loose sleepy feeling of a few drinks and a loud club and a good late night snack.

"Oh." Sam's hands grip Bucky's hips firmly, the way he likes it. "You're riled up, huh? The dancing?"

"No." Bucky's only got his shirt halfway unbuttoned but he starts opening Sam's shirt instead, hungry to reach skin. "You watching me dance."

That sends a zip of a thrill down Sam's spine. "Say more about that." He loves prodding Bucky to speak when he's frazzled and eager like this, flushing as he tries to name his desires.

Bucky kisses him then, deep and lingering, before drawing his mouth down to Sam's neck, tugging his shirt open and aside to mouth at his collarbones. "You get this intense look," Bucky manages, finally. "Anticipatory. I like it."

"Mm, you get a reward for that big word."

"Aw, can it."

Sam flips their positions then, slams Bucky back against the wall, holds him there with his forearm pressed across Bucky's chest. The pinning makes him shudder in pleasure. Sam finishes unbuttoning his own shirt one-handed, then shucks it off. Bucky's hands find his chest immediately. They're kissing then, Sam's body covering Bucky's. Slow and deep and lingering. Bucky is shaking with it. "Yeah, I watched you," Sam murmurs low in Bucky's ear. "Couldn't look away. No one could. No one can move like you. And no one gets to take you home but me." He unbuttons Bucky's shirt, but fastens the cuffs, then pulls the shirt off Bucky's shoulders and down his arms so the sleeves catch on his hands, effectively restraining his hands loosely behind him. Bucky thumps against the wall with a sigh. "That okay, baby?"

"It's good," Bucky hisses. "Kiss me."

So Sam does. He palms the hard line of Bucky's cock in his slacks and Bucky breaks the kiss to knock his head back against the wall. Something rich and warm unfolds in Sam's chest watching Bucky so open and vulnerable under him. This thing between them, for all its complications, is trust.

"It's your birthday," Sam says, still running his hand over Bucky's cock, making Bucky twitch and keen. "Tell me what you want."

His storm-blue eyes snap open. "I want to blow you," he says.

"Oh, all right, twist my arm," Sam murmurs.

Bucky drops to his knees, his arms still tangled up in the sleeves of his shirt. He looks up at Sam, bright-eyed and sweet and flushed, sweat beading again on his forehead and the hollow of his throat, shivering, trying to so hard to be patient. Sam's hand traces his jawline, his lips, the delicate shell of his ear. "Looks like I'm the one getting the present, huh?"

"Get your dick out before I headbutt you in the balls."

Sam laughs, really laughs, and that makes Bucky laugh, and it's just - it's a strange dark lonesome world and Sam is so goddamned lucky. He leans forward and kisses Bucky hard and sweet as he unfastens his jeans. He doesn't last long, no, and after he kisses the taste of himself from Bucky's mouth, he hauls Bucky to his quivering feet. In bed Sam takes him apart slowly with hands and mouth. In these moments the apartment doesn't matter, nor the city, nor their histories, not even the bizarre heroics that brought them together. Sam is home, finally, settled into the familiar private rituals of love.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> y'all I am having way too much fun writing this verse. I really enjoyed writing this chapter so if you happened to read and enjoy I would appreciate any comments or kudos. I am growing very attached to these characters :0 Since we're in NYC I had to cameo my underappreciated MCU favorite Foggy Nelson from Netflix Daredevil.
> 
> Title from Bat for Lashes - Daniel. Epigraph is lyrics from Future Islands - Aladdin. SOMEONE stop me from just posing my silly fanmixes.
> 
> Bucky's rent party memories were based off information in "Jookin': the Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture" by Katrina Hazzard-Gordon. Louis Prima, mentioned in this fic, has a great song called [House Rent Party Day](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oj73EilBI0) that sums it up pretty well.
> 
> If there's anything in this verse you'd like to see (scenes or w/e) feel free to ask in the comments, at this point I just enjoy writing it so I'm happy to fill requests if they get my gears turning.


	3. shock collared at the gates of heaven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A bad birthday. Jealousy rears its head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: a couple racial slurs are mentioned but not used.

On July 13th Bucky wakes up alone. The hard, hard mattress is cool on Sam's side and the covers unruffled. Bucky rolls over and pushes his face into Sam's pillow, inhales the faint scent of sweat and skin. It's not late, but it's also not unusual for Sam to be up and running along the Harlem River before he starts his day. So in the pleasant heat of the room despite the straining air conditioning Bucky stands and stretches long and languid, feels his spine lengthen and pop. 

In the kitchen Sam's left no note, but he did leave a half pot of coffee still hot in the carafe and for that consideration Bucky is thankful. He sits at the kitchen table, watches the steam rise from the cup.

It's Steve's birthday.

The whole July 4th birthday thing had been a nice bit of PR from the Army, when Steve started the whole bonds-selling tour in tights. On that day, Sam had mentioned it, but when Bucky was not responsive he hadn't pushed.

Bucky is, in all probability, the only person alive who knows the truth of this day. The small innocuous pointless truth of it. It separates Steve from Captain America, like Bucky can hang on to Steve's humanity as his memory melts into myth. It's odd, but he holds the secret like an ember in his palm. A damaging dying treasure. So much of his life with Steve is public knowledge, their intimate language of years-long jokes and differing similes diluted down to grainy footage in the Smithsonian. The privacy of this fact is both painful and beloved like his knife at Steve's throat. He'll tell Sam tonight. But a man can sit and feel his feelings. It's not always this bad but sometimes it is and today he lets the bad dark fill him all the way up because he's too tired to resist and it's easier to let it take over him like drowning.

Ungrateful bastard, he is. Conjure the image of that brashly sweet man who left you a pot of coffee because he knows you don't like making it. Imagine him in the doorway muscled arms crossed, frowning concerned at your brooding.

( _Which Bucky am I talking to?)_

He could layer the memories atop each other. Damn their twin concerns so piercing as to cut him when they're not even around.

And Steve doesn't have a grave. Bucky's life is like a Coney Island funhouse - a rickety ancient facsimilie of reality, a horror show of mirrors that warps whatever enters. Sam's voice in his mind: _Spare me the melodrama._

So no grave. So what? There's a whole borough that can act as Steve's grave. 

The weight of his body, of the arm, of the muscles and bone, keep him sinking into the chair. In memory he's in the war, in Paris with a whiskey in his hand, and there's Steve, Steve so determined and ferocious, his spirit burning brighter in a body that matches the power of his heart, and he's asking Bucky to follow him into the jaws of death. Bucky doesn't even remember what he said in response. Just the sinking feeling in his gut, the deep knowing, that this was it. Steve would live now, fully, dangerously, brutally live, live in the way his soul was crafted to live, a life of leadership and power and change, a life eased by the beauty and strength of his body.

Loving Steve was like chronic pain. Dull enough, encompassing enough, to be forgettable.

Now, Sam? That's love unlike anything he has known. But in these dark moments though Bucky wonders what he would give up to embrace Steve once more. Not a remnant of that long-abandoned desire for something more. Just. His friendship. His low laughing voice. His nimble hands patching wounds in the field, callused from the shield and the guns but still always the little callus on his right forefinger from sketching.

He stands suddenly, drinks half the coffee in a mouthful, shakes his head roughly, then runs his face under the cold tap. Come back to now, Bucky. This moment. This apartment. Remember. But don't get lost. Do twenty push ups. Get dressed. Then take the rumbling subway to the borough built on the forgotten graves of two young men whose undomesticated love yoked them together, and so, ignorant, they dragged each other gasping, bleeding, towards those jaws of death, and back, and towards, and back again.

 

It's fine until the crowded tourist-ridden transfer at Times Square, onto the uncanny Q line, rattling south. Brooklyn is a scarred and wounded mutant just like its oldest son. It's the same fucking subway station, a hundred years later. Church Avenue. This city is unbelievable. How is it possible that he's standing here in the subway station he used to stumble into as a young, young man, skinny and strong and underfed, work-drunk from brick laying in Manhattan or real-drunk from moonshine in Harlem? How is it possible that this is the same tile under his feet? The world has collapsed and been rebuilt - as has his mind, as has his body - and yet here in Brooklyn the Church Avenue subway station stands the same.

He almost laughs. It smells like piss and stale beer.

Up the stairs and onto the corner. His feet walk him east.

The strange weightlessness of it. The strange flat timelessness of it. The heat wobbling off the asphalt, warping the world. The smell of the garbage rotting curbside. Laughter. Honking.

Flatbush.

Everything is bigger and louder and completely different and exactly the same. Three blocks from the station the streets are wider, the alleys have street lamps, new privacy fences stand tall and the small gardens are well-maintained.

Devil take him. His building still stands. Five stories of red brick and white cornerstones, windows now dotted by air conditioning units. The same recessed entrance with the same fancy arched doorway that led into unkempt decrepitude. What is it like inside now? Does the rain still pelt the windows so hard it leaks inside? Does sixth step on the third story still creak on the right side? Do the downstairs neighbors still knock on the floor when one dances too drunk and heavy-footed? Does the fire escape still rattle a little under two people's weight but still, ultimately, hold it? At dinner does the hallway smell of onions and potatoes? Is it quiet on the rooftop? Can you see any stars?

A bike bell dings, snapping Bucky into reality as it whizzes by on the sidewalk, grocery bags hanging precariously from the handlebars, nearly knocking into him.

"Hey!" Bucky calls. "Sidewalk's for walking, asshole!"

The rider flips him the bird and keeps going.

He spends hours walking Flatbush in unspecified directions. His body takes him places and the mind remembers why upon arrival: diners where he and Steve sat and drank coffee and picked at toast and nursed hangovers, alleyways where Steve got his ass beat for spreading his commie lit, delis where Bucky stocked shelves, groceries that gave him a line of credit when he needed it most. Steve haunts him. A blonde head catches his eye, or a wild unreserved laugh sounds in the distance, or the sound of something dropped and a curse. Hard times, then, but times are always hard. The innocence of their time here, though, it's so close, yet ungraspable, like a shadow or a breath.

 

At some point Bucky's phone rings. He's sitting on the steps of the temple in Flatbush, the one he used to go inside sometimes - he can't bring himself to go inside, not yet, not now, but he can't leave, so he sits.

"'Lo?"

"Hey handsome," the warm voice rumbles through the line, "What are you wearing?"

Bucky says nothing, can't, feels unmoored in time - who is this?

"Or not," the voice says easily. "I'm driving back from training, thought I might stop and pick up some takeout, you want something? I was thinking lasagna."

"I ain't eatin' no lasagna from no Jersey w--" Steve would be laughing already, cutting him off with barbs: _You're just jealous of our delicious goyim food. And don't even think about making a crack about potatoes with those garbage latkes you make--_ "--Italian," Bucky says, sharply, suddenly present.

"Excuse me? Jersey _what?_ "

Ah, shit. Fuck.

"Jesus, Bucky, I can deal with your weird outbursts about being gay, but-- you got any names for _me_ you wanna spit out?"

"Fuck you mean by that?"

"You know what I mean, are you crazy?"

"Well," Bucky says, icily, "I guess I fuckin' am. A little crazy."

"Fuckin'-- Jesus, whatever, you know that's not what-- We'll talk when I'm home. Get your own food, then."

Sam hangs up. Bucky cracks his phone in his vibranium hand. He stands up from the steps and feels dizzy. He slinks towards Prospect Park and buys a bottle of wine at a bodega along the way. In the park he lies down and drinks the entire bottle and the wine does nothing, fucking nothing, it never does, and he still tries, he still longs for it, the erasure of it, the sweet hot haze of it; he is always running from the reality of what is and instead chasing what will never be again. 

_(1935. Steve shuffles along small and slender and sweating in the summer heat next to him. "So what'd you get me for my birthday, huh, Buck?" he says, cheeky. "Since I'm eighteen now, a real man."_

_"Not a damn thing." Bucky wraps his arm around Steve's shoulders, tugs him close, until Steve is cussing and wiggling away._

_"You smell like shit."_

_"It's the docks, someone's gotta do the work around here."_

_In Prospect Park they spread out an old sheet and Bucky pays a penny for a cup of ice and they suck on the cubes, stick them down each other's shirts and Steve is howling with laughter._

_"I lied," Bucky says, when they finally fall back, beat, letting the lowering sun shine on their faces. "I did get you a present."_

_"I knew it," Steve says._

_From the inner pocket of his jacket, lying in the grass, Bucky produces a small bag of blackberries warmed from the sun. The tart flavor explodes on Bucky's tongue, sweet and rich, and it stains Steve's hands and lips purple and somehow makes his eyes look so inhumanly blue, bluer than the sky, bluer than newfangled neon sign at the diner across the street from their apartment. He don't need anything more than this.)_

 

Gruesome subway station bathrooms are used only by junkies and miserable fucking sops like himself and inside one Bucky throws it all up, the wine like thinned blood, and he bashes his head against the edge of the toilet and stays there until the poor MTA worker has to knock on the door and tell him to keep it moving. God bless Brooklyn.

One long cold subway ride and tourist-ridden transfer later, he makes it home to Washington Heights. In their apartment Sam is morosely eating lasagna at the kitchen table. He looks up at Bucky like he has a speech prepared, but pauses, gives him an odd look and says, "You look bad."

"I was in Brooklyn," Bucky says.

"Oh?"

"It got me all addled."

"Why?"

"'Cause it ain't the same no more."

"No, I mean, why were you there?"

"I dunno. It's Steve's birthday." The words blowing on the ember in his palm, giving it one last gasp before it dies.

Sam pauses. "I thought his birthday was the fourth."

"That's his fake birthday," Bucky says. "Today's his real birthday. Ain't got a grave to stand at or anything so I went and looked at our old apartment building. Still there. What I said on the phone - didn't - almost said - it weren't me. S'from then. Before. You get called k-- bullshit names," he spits, can't even say it, and Sam winces, "--or fairy, or traitor, and you start sayin' shit too."

"You can't say that shit to me. I won't hear it."

"I thought I was talkin' to Steve," Bucky admits. "I got turned around."

"Like that makes it any better." Sam rubs his hand across his forehead. "So it's bad today, huh?"

Bucky doesn't realize he's sinking to the floor until he's seated on it, his back against the kitchen doorframe.

Sam's kneeling in front of him. Bucky didn't even see him move. "You okay, honey?" Sam's voice soft and sweet, the back of his hand on Bucky's forehead, then his thumb rubbing at a dark spot of wine at the corner of Bucky's mouth.

"I just miss him so bad," Bucky says, suddenly weak, his head tipped forward, eyes closed, slurring slightly. "My brother. Friend. ...Handler. The skeleton inside me. The scaffolding." His hands at his eyes pressing. "We both got so much time. But hardly any with each other. If I could just see him, one more time, his real face, the small face..."

"You didn't tell me," Sam murmurs. A long, long pause. Then: "Tell me the truth, baby," Sam says with his roughened palm on Bucky's face. "If he were still here, we -- we wouldn't be together like this, would we?"

There it is, the thing they've been dancing around since Bucky came back from Sokovia. Hell of a time to bring it up. As if Sam were handing him a knife. Bucky primed to plunge it into his heart.

"No," Bucky murmurs. "No, I don't guess we would."

The silence is worse than any sound Bucky can imagine. Sam drops his hand.

"What am I doing?" Sam says, so quietly, like he's speaking to himself. He stands up, sighs, wrings his hands.

"Sam, it ain't --" Bucky's hands find Sam's sweatpants. Holding on desperately but unable to look up. "It's ain't a choice. It's not - it's not normal. There wasn't no me. It was just us. There was no space. I never wanted to be - with him. Like what we have. I let that go in the war. It was just - he was everything. For so long. For so fuckin' long."

"I thought I got it but I guess I don't. Bucky, come on, how am I supposed to compete with that? You carry it all around, stew in your hurt, and then it comes out like this, all messed up, and I gotta deal with it. You realize the whole point of a relationship is helping each other? Why didn't you tell me about today? We could've gone to Brooklyn together, baby. You could've showed me the apartment, told me stories, given me the whole tour. Made sense of it. Instead of letting everything get all rattled around in here." He taps Bucky's forehead. "When you lock me out it makes me want to stop trying."

"Stop-- trying?"

"If whatever I do isn't as good as Steve's memory then I may as well leave you to it." Sam pulls away from Bucky's grasp, crosses the room to stand at the sink with his back to Bucky, shoulders quivering minutely. "I hate that idiot sometimes," Sam mutters.

"No, Sam--" Bucky's heart on fire in his chest. The air thin. Foolish, weighted by the corpses he drags behind, he watches as the beacon of his life moves forward without him. "Come on."

"And what?" Sam says, turning around, his eyes shining. "What do you want from me? What are we doing?"

"You're it for me," Bucky says, but he stands up, so they can look at each other, the kitchen table defensively between them. "You're it. If you go there ain't gonna be anyone else for me after you."

"Gotta say, the before seems to be overwhelming the after."

"What do you want from me, then?" Bucky snaps.

"I want you to stop hiding shit like this! Stop suffering in silence! There's no point to it! It's like you're just letting cuts get infected over and over instead of treating them. You gotta talk to me."

"Okay. What else?"

That surprises Sam. "I can't do this if I'm second place," Sam admits. "You don't love me like him."

Wildfire love, a vengeful love, a love that kills in its wake. "I don't. I love you better."

"But that's only possible in a world where he's gone."

"Unsure. ...Well, also, you could technically say that about any ex."

Sam rolls his eyes. "Come here," and Bucky obeys immediately, collapses into Sam's arms, pressing flush against him, his forehead leaning against Sam's shoulder.

"I mean it, though," Bucky manages. "I've been a lot of people. And they're all in my head. And the one that loves Steve so crazy ain't the person I am now. That guy, he's - angry. Repressed. Hurting. Feels - cheated. Like today, walking around Flatbush, I couldn't - figure out where I was. It was all jumbled. Time and space. Everything all mixed together. But overall feeling like, I got robbed of something, by the war, by Hydra. I hate it. I can't love you like that - stuck in the past. You know. What happened happened. And this - you - us - this life. I love it. It scares me. Because, you know. Loving anything is a risk."

"I know all that. Just quit running away," Sam says, and his voice breaks slightly, and Bucky can feel his chest stuttering where they're pressed together. "It's giving me a complex, man."

Bucky pulls his his head back to look at Sam - the bags under his dark eyes, his defined cheekbones, his lips twisted concerned when they're meant to be grinning. Ah, God damn Bucky's greedy heart. No man should live this long and love this hard. It's healing, it's shattering, it's too much, it's never enough. "I don't mean to - I'm a few bricks short of a load. When it's bad I'm like a dog crawling under the porch to die. It's instinct."

"Well, you ain't a dog, you're a person. So you gotta work on that."

"Simple as that, huh?"

"Simple as that." Sam cards his hands through Bucky's hair, which makes Bucky shudder and close his eyes. "Tell me what you're thinking."

"I love you," Bucky says immediately. "I wanna be different. I wanna kiss you but I threw up a bunch of wine in the subway station."

 

As it turns out, despite Sam's posturing he did buy enough lasagna for two.

"I'm sorry," Sam says, suddenly, as Bucky picks at his food. "You're grieving. And I made it about me."

Bucky props his chin in his hand. He feels scraped empty. Is that all this is? Grief? "Well, I hurt you."

"Still."

"I don't have a monopoly on feeling shitty."

"Guess there's plenty to go around," Sam says. "If only Cap could see us now."

He imagines Steve, post-serum, in his tight little uniform, refereeing this argument with an eyeroll and an exasperated, _Come on guys, we're on the same team here._ He finds himself smiling in spite of it all. "Why, so he could blame himself for our fighting?"

Then Sam's smiling back, small, tentative. "Can't stay mad around all that self-flagellation."

"Speak for yourself," Bucky says. "But. You know. He'd be happy. For us."

"God, I know," Sam says, rubbing his forehead again. He looks exhausted. "That's the worst part. I know."

* * *

In a different reality, one no less dark or painful or cruel than the one Steve abandoned, it's July 13th, sometime in the mid-2010s. Steve forgets sometimes. His face is barely lined. He stands outside his life, above it, like an oracle. Without the indifferent serendipity of his previous life he's crippled by knowledge and loneliness.

Memory hits like a sniper's bullet. He remembers his birthday a lifetime - two lifetimes - ago. In Prospect Park, turning eighteen. Bucky's arm around him. The taste of blackberries, sharp, warm, pungent on his tongue. The memory of love a sweet balm, not a source of regret and pain, like it often is, like it tends to be when he sees the secret laughing looks between him and his love here in his created world.

It happened once. He held that love like an ember in his palm. For all the loss he's mitigated in this reality there's been new loss, new mistakes. And never that feeling again. That stunned surprise of seeing Bucky pull the berries from his jacket, that playful mischief in his grey eyes. Poor, sick, and in love, he knew he never needed more than that - never more than his best friend and a warm day. Until he did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from Foxing - Grand Paradise.
> 
> Way Back is about the initial development of a relationship. Now I can't stop thinking - what happens when the honeymoon period wears off? Esp for Sam, how do you love someone who has a steel thread connecting them to someone else? And for Bucky how do you love with agency? So this is the start of that exploration. If this concept becomes another full-fledged story in this "completed" series don't judge me lol. 
> 
> Big thank you to everyone who has been reading, commenting, kudosing. It really means a lot to me. I am getting really wrapped up in this verse so it's been so wonderful to see other people enjoying it. If you have a second to leave a comment or a kudos you will make my day <3


	4. velleities of self-erasure

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ok I said initially each chapter was a standalone but this one takes place pretty soon after chapter 3. It's also VERY feel-good and also VERY explicit so...... be aware.

_You learned early that adults' genteel_  
_fantasies about human life_

_were not, for you, life. You think sex_

_is a knife_  
_driven into you to teach you that._

* * *

The last thing Sam expected from this gig was a paycheck. From the moment he handed Steve the folder containing details of his classified missions - nervous as all hell, clenching his fingers into the muscles of his arm, thinking, God damn, Captain America, the fucking Black Widow - he figured he'd be riding out his savings for a couple years, then either figure something out, or die heroically in an alien battle or something. After everything settled down, a large transfer appeared in his bank account with the note "Back pay." And Rhodey, god bless him, emailed Sam to let him know he was now "on the payroll." Whatever that means. There's really not a good word for what Rhodes, Hogan, and Potts are doing - administration isn't the right word but it's not _not_ administration. Point is, he's making a comfortable living in this weird quasi-secret quasi-defined role, training, helping with the upstate recovery, biding his time until Hill and Fury and the off-world team piss off some new intergalactic entity.

So when Shuri gets in touch about the new Wakandan Youth Outreach Center in the Bronx, he vehemently refuses to be on staff and insists on operating in a volunteer capacity. He knows his limits and knows he'd get way too invested in a job there. With some huffing Shuri agrees, gives him the title "consultant-slash-volunteer," and Sam helps vet the new staff and works his DC VA connections to find good, steady people to lead the youth therapy program in the Center. The building itself is a nondescript three-story brick building on Bronxwood, near the very center of the borough. Were it not for the sleek black signage it wouldn't look any different than the delis and department stores surrounding it. Inside, though, it's been gutted and remodeled with the sleek whites and greys of Wakandan design. There's classrooms, social services, and casual hangout spaces - and it always seems to be busy.

Every other Thursday he leads a college application workshop for high schoolers. The classroom is small and well-lit and full of all sorts of techno-gadgetry that Sam doesn't use. He makes his kids hand-write their essays. These damn kids, Sam thinks, watching them pair up and revise admission essays, They keep showing up. Some once, some a few times. With questions and ideas and plans. These kids who have seen the world destroyed and are still willing to create some sort of future. It astounds him, the resiliency and the continual looking forward.

He could use some of that. Since Steve's somewhat disastrous non-birthday last week things have been deferential between him and Bucky. As if there was a thin pane of glass between them. When Bucky had left for Sokovia nearly two years ago Sam had been crushed with the sudden, unexplained, unexpected loss of closeness. It was platonic, sure, mostly. But there was something simmering under the surface he hadn't explored. Without Bucky Sam's body seemed to ache incessantly. In the beginning he exhausted himself always glancing around the apartment to find the source of some imagined silent footstep. Or he'd get an alert in his email for a new bike posted on Craigslist, and click over to the ad before he remembered. Or just explaining, explaining, explaining, to Dee, to the group, to the Avengers. Then as it became clear Bucky would not be coming back within a few weeks, he let himself feel his anger and betrayal. Felt it so deeply he fractured his hand on a heavy bag. But simultaneously he understood why Bucky left. And so his desire hardened like a coal in his heart as he thought, Jesus, I'll take whatever he can give me. Just let him come back.

But what Bucky can give is not enough, huh?

He rubs his hand across his forehead.

It's fine. They worked it out.

But it doesn't feel fine. He wonders if they need different things. If there's some sort of misalignment.

"Yo, Mr. Wilson." His students are looking expectantly at him.

It's nearly the end of their scheduled time. "Sorry," he says. "Distracted. You all done editing?"

Nods all around. "There's some dude in the hallway who keeps looking in here."

Another kid elbows the speaker. "You can't call him 'some dude.'"

"All right, all right," Sam says. "Take your edits home, revise, and email me the new drafts. We'll go over them next session."

The kids file out, laughing and shoving each other.

Bucky appears in the doorway. His right arm is behind his back. His left arm, the metal arm, is missing. The sleeve of his red henley is tied into a neat knot beneath his shoulder.

Sam is out of his chair like it's on fire beneath him. "What happened? Are you okay?"

"Oh," Bucky says, glancing down at his arm. "Oh, shit, yes, sorry." He steps inside and tugs the door closed, his right arm still behind his back. "Nothing happened. I was just -- in the neighborhood. So I brought you a coco bread."

"You brought me a coco bread?"

From behind his back Bucky reveals a paper bag and an iced coffee, both balanced precariously in one hand. "Ta-da."

There's a lot going on here. Sam takes the bag. He does love coco bread.

"The arm," Bucky says. "I left it at home."

"You left your arm at home."

"It comes off," Bucky says with an easy shrug. "I don't take it off much. But some days -- my brain is tired. And it feels heavy and sluggish. Like the connections don't work right."

"So it's easier to just go without."

"Not all the time. Shuri and her team designed it like this. So they could do maintenance on it without me being attached."

The HYDRA chairs uncovered in abandoned bunkers flash in Sam's memory, with their thick metal restraints and bloodstained seats.

"Anyway," Bucky says. "I know you have another class. Want me to pick up dinner? I'm not cooking one-handed."

Bucky looks fine - clear-eyed, loose in the shoulders, clean-shaven. But the arm thing makes Sam nervous. "Are you okay?"

"What?" Bucky says with a little smirk, "Something's gotta be wrong for me to stop by and see my man?"

Sam sets the coco bread and coffee on his desk, leans back against it, and tugs Bucky in close so he's standing between Sam's legs, Sam's hands on Bucky's hips. "Call me that again."

Bucky's cheeks color slightly. "What? 'My man'?"

"What else you call me when I'm not around?"

"Oh, I dunno, Big Bird, the Pigeon, Captain Smartass..."

"Yeah, okay, Teen Wolf." Sam rolls his eyes, drops his hands. Whatever he was seeking he ain't getting today.

Bucky's brow creases slightly and he takes Sam's hand in his own. "I'm a-hundred-and-eight," he says. "What am I supposed to call you, my boyfriend?"

"The kids are using partner these days," Sam says, carefully, tangling their fingers together.

"That doesn't work when we're literally already crime-fighting partners."

Sam chuckles, but he's too tired to fight, to push, to try to figure out the boundaries of their relationship. He tilts his chin down, watches Bucky's thumb trace across the back of his own hand. "Change it to Captain Fineass and that works."

Bucky murmurs a laugh too, half-hearted, soft between them. "I don't know," he says, suddenly, sighing. "Marry me and I'll call you my husband."

The words land like a sudden hailstorm on Sam's skin - shocking, painful, not altogether unpleasant. "Marry you?" he says, pulling back slightly, but not untangling their hands. "You being serious right now?"

Bucky shrugs again. "When I was in Sokovia, with Wanda, we were talking about Natasha. I think I knew her, when I was the Soldier, and she was Red Room. I think I helped train her. I have these strange fuzzy memories of it. But I never asked her. Wanda told me our lives offer no time for delay. I've lived a long fuckin' time. But it feels like death is always right around the corner, in our line of work. So. I don't want to waste time with you thinking I'm not --" He pauses, scowls, casts his eyes around the room. "Thinking I'm not all-in. I have bad days. Like today." He shrugs his left shoulder. "Or like Steve's birthday. Where things get muddled. And it's still - it's not my first thought to ask for help. When it gets bad. But I am, you know. All-in."

"You wanna be my husband, huh," Sam says, slightly awed, one hand in Bucky's, the other at the back of Bucky's neck, squeezing there. "You're not just saying that because I'm insecure?"

"No," Bucky says. "I brought you a coco bread because you're insecure."

Sam's eyes track over Bucky's face, flushing in earnest now, Bucky's eyes skittering around the room nervously. "Christ Almighty. Sergeant Barnes, you'll make an honest man of me yet." With his hand on the back of Bucky's neck he pulls him into a kiss, nothing crazy, he's at work, seriously, he can't believe Bucky sprang this on him at _work_ , but it's sweet and carries a promise of something else.

They break apart and Bucky tips his forehead against Sam's. "So that's a yes?"

"Yes, you idiot, I thought --" He thought if it ever happened he'd be doing the asking. In ten years, minimum. "I didn't know you wanted that."

"Now you do." Bucky pulls away and he looks brighter, lighter, grinning at Sam like he's young again. "Your students are coming up the stairs."

"Oh, shit," Sam says, and pulls the coco bread out of the bag and eats half of it in a bite. "Get outta here, then. I'll see you at home."

"Love it when you talk through your food like that," Bucky says, and Sam throws the balled-up paper bag at him. The door opens and his next group of students wander in, talking and joking around, not sparing a glance for Bucky as he slips out the door.

 

Outside the WYOC, Sam thumbs through his phone. He wants to call Darlene. But it feels too fragile, delicate, like a seedling planted, to share. Instead he texts Bucky, tells him he's on his way.

There's no response. On the subway home Sam turns over possibilities in his mind. Bucky might be out picking up food. Or putting his arm back on, however that works. Or showering, that's a nice image. Or, if he's lucky, lights low, in their shared bedroom, shirtless, all that tan skin on their soft sheets, his boxer-briefs low on his hips, his right hand sliding down. In their shared apartment, shared life. And Bucky had said it so easily. _Marry me._ Like it was obvious. Like it was something they'd already agreed upon.

The night before Bucky left for Algiers, he'd touched Sam's burn wounds so gently and with such an expression of deep anguish it scared him. As if somewhere in his heart he knew Bucky couldn't take it yet, the reality of what love entails. As they'd laid there facing each other, Bucky unable to look away from Sam's wounds, Sam unable to look away from Bucky's shining concerned storm-grey eyes, he'd also known, in his gut, he had it bad. He had it bad and he had it forever.

Bucky's rough, sturdy fingers in his own. _Marry me._ Sam tips his head back against the cool seat of the subway and grins at the ceiling.

 

Well, he didn't answer the text because he was asleep.

There are takeout containers keeping warm in the oven and the kitchen light's on, plates on the table haphazardly. The man himself - his fiance, Sam thinks a little crazily - is on the couch, shirtless, ass-up, his right arm tucked tightly against his body, his left side pressed into the back of the couch. Sleeping hard, war-hard. His metal left shoulder just ends abruptly, the complicated-looking connections recessed slightly.

Sam runs his fingers through Bucky's short hair. "Lazy. I gotta get you a job."

Bucky hums as he awakens, eyes still closed, wriggling into the couch further. "I have a job," he murmurs. "I'm an Avenger."

"I mean a real job. You should teach spin classes or something." Without warning Sam takes Bucky by the wrist, kneels down, and pulls him into a fireman's carry. Bucky hoots in surprise as Sam stands easily with Bucky's body draped over his shoulders like dead weight. "Damn," Sam says, "That arm weighs a fuckin' ton. This is easy."

"Show-off," Bucky says, wriggling.

Sam walks them to their bedroom and drops Bucky on the bed. "What's for dinner?" he asks as he strips off his shirt.

"Panang curry." Bucky stretches long and luxurious, catlike, from the tips of his bare toes through his arm overhead. "And tom kha gai."

"Excellent," Sam says. On the bed Bucky is watching him curiously, hungrily, his grey eyes half-closed to slivers. Sam kneels at the foot of the bed and takes Bucky's foot in hand, presses his thumb to the sole of it, massaging, and Bucky groans in pleasure. "I was distracted in my class," Sam says.

"Oh, were you?"

"Yeah," Sam says, and he places a kiss on the sole of Bucky's foot, and then moves his ministrations to the other. "Thinking about my fiance."

He feels the shiver run through Bucky's body. "Sounds corny," Bucky says, unconvincingly.

"Yeah, this guy turns me into a total sap."

"Get up here," Bucky says, scooting back on the bed, pulling his feet out of Sam's reach. Once Sam's on the bed Bucky pushes him down, flat on his back, and straddles his hips. His ass in his thin sweatpants pressing firm on Sam's cock in his nice work slacks. "Even like this?" Bucky says, not shy but curious, his head tilted slightly. "Even when his brain don't work right? Or when his arm's gone?"

"Hell yeah," Sam says, pulling his lower lip between his teeth. He slides his hands up the sides of Bucky's body, from waist to shoulder, feeling the muscles there, noticing for the first time the slight imbalance of it, how his lats on the left side are larger, overdefined from carrying the weight of the arm. "Any way, any how, baby."

Bucky leans down and kisses him, deep and hot and demanding. They break apart only to wrestle out of their pants and then Sam's got Bucky on top of him, hard-muscled and hot, skin always so hot from the serum, Bucky's mouth open on his neck, legs slotted together and rutting. Sam wraps his arms around Bucky, holding him close, his mouth near Bucky's ear. "You wanna come like this, baby?" he asks, one fingers tripping down Bucky's back, his fingers dipping into the cleft of his ass. "Or you want me to fuck you?"

"Tough call," Bucky murmurs, his mouth traveling down, dropping kisses on Sam's pecs. "Fuck me. With me on top."

"Ooh," Sam says, grinning, gripping Bucky's ass hard. "I like it when you get bossy."

Sam lays Bucky down flat on his back and works him open with their fancy lube and his deft fingers, kissing him hard through the inital stretch of it, fucking him on his hand slow and easy until Bucky is grimacing into the kiss with desire, groaning. "There you go, baby," Sam murmurs, his free hand jerking him off slowly. "Nice and loose for me, huh?"

Bucky's lost his words as he often does when sensation takes over. He just bares his teeth into the kiss, exhales in a huff, then pushes Sam off him, rolling them so Sam's on his back again. Bucky straddles his hips and kisses him again, just like they started, but this time he's wet with lube and Sam's cock slides across his hole, in the wet hot heat there, just rubbing, and Bucky growls something low in his chest that might be Sam's name. Sam keeps one hand on Bucky's hip, controlling the slow grinding pace, and his other hand finds Bucky's jawline, guiding the kiss then pulling away.

"Look at me," Sam says, and Bucky's eyes blink open, and he's flushed and sweating. "So sweet." Sam dips his thumb into the corner of Bucky's mouth. "My husband."

Bucky pants, open mouthed with desire. He murmurs something in Russian Sam doesn't understand.

"You with me, baby?"

Sam can see the effort in Bucky's face as he shifts languages. "Yes," he says, chasing Sam's thumb, kissing it. "With you."

"Get on with it, then." Sam grips his own cock, nudging the head against Bucky's hole.

"I gotta do... all the work," Bucky manages, but his eyes glimmer with laughter before they flick closed as he sinks down on Sam's cock.

God. Sam will never get used to this. Hot and tight and wet around him. Hard and strong above him. Bucky takes him all the way in, his forearm on the bed next to Sam's head, leaning down so they share breath. Then Bucky begins to move, sliding up, then down, his hips working, the muscles in his core tensing. Sam keeps his hands on Bucky's hips, not guiding, just steadying. And his hips shift to meet Bucky's, getting deeper, fucking a gasp from Bucky's lungs.

Sam takes one hand off Bucky's hips, sets it in front of Bucky's face, says, "Get this wet," and Bucky sucks his fingers into his mouth, licks his palm. "Good boy." Then he wraps that hand around Bucky's cock, and Bucky cries out, picks up the pace.

Bucky collapses atop him, trapping Sam's hand between their bodies. Bucky mouths at Sam's neck and Sam plants his heels into the mattress, drives his hips up, fucking into Bucky hard and fast, and Bucky is writhing against him, sweating, making these sweet gasps and small moans, and Sam's free arm wraps tight around Bucky's shoulders. "So good," Sam murmurs into Bucky's hair, "God, you feel good. Come on, baby, let go. Come for me."

With a shuddering cry Bucky does, comes long and hard over Sam's hand, over both their bodies where they're pressed together, and he melts down pliant and soft and sighing and contented, and that makes Sam's heart ache like he can't bear it, and he feels his orgasm build fast and hot in his gut, and he pounds hard into Bucky's body and Bucky just positively purrs, pressing back into it just slightly, and Bucky kisses Sam's neck and then bites, gently, and the sharp edge is enough to make Sam tilt his head back and come hard, toes curling, thighs clenching, the release crashing over him with sudden powerful relief like diving into water from a great height.

In the aftershocks Sam disentangles them slowly, rolls a grumbling Bucky off him. He kisses Bucky then, lazily, running his hand over his sweat-soaked body and then over his ass, across his hole, feeling the mess there. Bucky shivers. "How you feeling?" Sam asks.

Bucky steals one more kiss, then rolls onto his belly. He hums thoughtfully. "Love you."

Sam sits up, straddles Bucky's thighs, and runs his hands down Bucky's back, working at the tightness in his traps and lats, and the knots along his spine. He presses his thumbs into Bucky's lower back, then the heels of his hands hard into Bucky's ass, which makes him groan with pleasure.

"Feel good?" Sam asks. He pushes most of his weight into his hands, pressing into the muscle there, working at a deep massage.

"Watch it," Bucky murmurs. "You'll get me going again."

"Is that so?" He spreads Bucky's ass cheeks then, revealing his hole all swollen and wet and used, "Guess I better clean you up, then."

By the time they're ready to eat, the takeout is very cold.

 

The next morning, over coffee, Bucky asks him, sheepishly, to help him with the arm.

"Course," Sam says, as he pulls on an old VA sweatshirt, preparing for another day at the Jersey facility. "Does it hurt? Reattaching it?"

"Not really," Bucky says. "Feels weird." He seems to radiate nervousness.

Sam is struck, suddenly, by the vulnerability of this moment. "Have you ever done this outside of Wakanda?"

"No," Bucky says. "I just - I couldn't stand it yesterday. It just hurt as soon as I woke up. Heavy. Wouldn't move right. It's easy to take off. But putting it on myself..."

"Kinda hard to do one-handed?"

He shrugs. "I figured you could help me."

Sam's throat catches. "You figured right, baby. Where is it?"

It's under the bed, which is surreal and funny, this beautiful super-expensive piece of vibranium technology just chilling under the bed like a stored holiday decoration. Sam carries into the kitchen. Bucky's sitting in a chair at the kitchen table and he sees the arm, scowls slightly, then makes a terrible, terrible face - flat-eyed, he bares his teeth like he's waiting for something. A mouthpiece.

"Hey," Sam says, and he puts the arm on the table with a clunk, touches Bucky's face gently with his hand. "You don't have to put it back on."

Bucky blinks a few times, focusing on Sam's face. "No, I--" he shakes his head slightly. "No, I want to. It's good. It's fine. With you it's fine."

"You're gonna have to walk me through it."

"It's easy," Bucky says. "You just slot it into place. Like a bike wheel into the dropouts. The tech will do the rest."

Sam picks up the arm, aligns it with the notches in the shoulder piece.

"Just push it in," Bucky says.

With slight click the arm attaches into the joint. The plates whir, shifting slightly, as if living, and the seam between the joint and the arm disappears. Bucky makes a strange noise, a sort of huffed exhale, and his eyes dart wildly around the room and roll back in his head for a frightening moment, he bites his tongue, but then as soon as it happens it's over, his eyes are forward, and he looks fine, save for the sweat beaded on his forehead.

Bucky clenches the metal fist, rolls his shoulder.

"Feel okay?"

"Yeah," Bucky says. "Feels better today. Thank you."

Sam takes Bucky's vibranium hand in his own and lifts it to his mouth, kisses the fingertips. "Good. Tough guy."

Bucky's face goes soft, awed. "Damn right," he says, it should be a joke, but it's not. "Couldn't do it without you, Cap."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> avengers movies: aliens! political intrigue! space travel!  
> me: but how does the payroll structure work?!
> 
> this is sooo corny, I just needed to be dramatic and corny after the last chapter. as a side note I got a (I'm about to reveal my age with this word) plotbunny for a For Real sequel to Way Back, so let me watch FFH and then go from there. we shall see. as always thank you SO much for reading and for any comments/kudos, they really make my day.
> 
> Title and epigraph from the poem Queer by Frank Bidart.


End file.
